notestotheotherside

Dear Dan. I still haven't got a good grip on what happened…. Jan 25 I went into UNM hospital with a fever.   Feb 20th I wake up in some place I called "EPP international" after wild hallucinations about dying in various horrible ways that when on and on, mixed with ancient astronomy and philosophy.   Dropped in a box to the bottom of the English Cannel,  My head buried in a deep hole full of palm leaves.  Being dead as a loud buzz and a bright light like the old "test pattern" that played way back when, when TV was over for the day.  that's it, nothing more will ever happen!  (did this correspond to having a blood pressure of 30?)   don't know if my psyche will ever heal. -Michael Hi Michael. Its been a few weeks since this exchange, and I'm still haunted by image of afterlife as the TV test pattern and a loud buzz and "nothing more will ever happen"  I know it must have been hallucinatory horror, but give yourself credit for fertile imagin...

I woke up in a bed in a very strange looking hospital room, with what looked something like an old coal furnace in the corner. There was a doctor with a British accent looking over me. The doctor told me that I was to get another liver transplant. From the British accent I inferred that I had been flown to England for this operation. \Then Meg came into the room and I noticed something very odd about her behavior around the doctor; she seemed much to familiar with him. The doctor left the room. Meg came close to my bed, looked into my eyes and told me that she was in love with this British doctor. She hadn’t loved me for the past ten years. How was it possible that you had not noticed? Then she left. I suspected that something nefarious was going on. I was not in a legitimate hospital. I was in some special hospital run by this doctor who did liver transplants for money. I was not in England, but rather on a barge floating in the English channel. Worse, the doctor did not p...

Dear Dan On Jan 1 I started triple drug therapy for hepC-- latest antiviral (telaprevir), ribavirin and and interferon. They had treated some 50 liver transplant patients this way at Mayo. Interferon and hep C both interact in complicated ways with the immune system. On around the evening of Jan 25 I developed a shaking chill fever. Meg called an ambulance and toke me to UNM hospital where I was put in the medical ICU. Some three days later, Meg was unhappy with my care at UNM. Just as I was slipping into a coma, she got me on a med-vac flight to Jacksonville, at the last possible moment that I could still be transported. At Mayo, Jacksonville a team of some 6 doctors and nurses worked on me for 3 hours to stabilize me and then struggled to keep my blood pressure up over the next 2 weeks. I hallucinated throughout this period, and for at least a week on and off after I came out of the coma. I awoke from the coma incredibly debilitated. Just standing with help was virtually imp...

Hi Michael. Been following your blog. Holy crap you are through the wringer with this. I know it sounds corny, but your good spirit and wry style are a real inspiration.. And Meg is a pillar. Keep on! Dan Y ear of the rest assured disposable toilet seat cover There is no doubt that I am influenced by David Foster Wallace, more than any other author at the moment.  Infinite Jest gets in your brain and is not coming out.  So I have chosen not to fight his influence, but rather to work under his tutorage to find my own voice. Call this the YEAR OF THE REST ASSURE DISPOSABLE TOILET SEAT COVER. It's 2011, and I am 54. I am in Jacksonville Florida once again shopping for parts in the graveyard. It has been 28 years since liver #3 (not including original equipment) and I am waiting for #4. Going Borat Wed morning, very early... slept like a zombie last night.  my Delta flight Monday was major delayed due to a mechanical problem.  To make my appointment here in Jacksonville, I flew SouthWe...

I regained consciousness in the ICU after transplant number three. Following a liver transplant you have an intubation tube in your mouth, a tube in your abdomen draining into a bile bag, two or three surgical tubes connected to grenade-size acrylic containers that can be squeezed down to suck blood and interstitial fluid out of your side (Pratt drains), a tube in your dick draining your pee into a bottle. A machine is forcing you to breath through the intubation tube which is a very uncomfortable feeling. The surgeries back then were very long. My first transplant was eighteen hours and they used seventy pints of blood. I don’r remember the stats for number three. You are very weak after such an ordeal. And on the third i was very weak already going into the surgery. I had taken a beating and was nearing the bottom of a long decline from a young fire trail runner (a 700 foot climb from the Campanile to the top at the Lawrence Hall of Science who also did push-ups and used ...

So as you know in Pittsburg I eventually needed three transplants. You recall that I rejected the first and lost the second to a viral infection (CMV). In those days there was no treatment for viruses. My father had explained that they couldn’t be killed because they were not really alive, not able to replicate in the absence of a host. Did you know that von Neumann had proposed (before the discovery of DNA) that living things were self replicating machines, and that therefore there needed to be something to transmit the information in order to replicate? I always think of that when I think, what is life? So after I tested positive for CMV, the doctors basically stopped coming into the room. I started running dangerously high fevers (like 105), and the nurses put me on a cold mattress. Then one night, weak from fever but unable to sleep with from nearly continuous coughing, I got out of bed and sat in a chair with my headphones and tape player. I listened to Band of Gypsies. ...

Y ou recall that back in Berkeley Meg and I were living in a flat on the second floor of a classic brown-shingle on Hillegass avenue just off of Telegraph. It was the spring of 1983 and Meg and I were to be married in late May. We went on long runs together op the fire trail in the hills which were sweet with the smell of eucalyptus. On weekend mornings we would walk to the corner bakery on College Avenue to get fresh hot rolls and strong coffee, and sit and chat with friends. The wedding invitations went out. Meg sent one back to us. When our invitation to our own wedding arrived, I tore it trying to get it out of the envelop. Why I couldn’t say. Why had I been so careless? Meg cried when she saw the torn invitation. She accused me of no longer wanting to marry her. I admitted to myself that something was wrong, Meg and I discussed what was going on, the signs, the symptoms:: always tired, less fun and short tempered, muscle wasting. One morning while shaving, I starre...

I never told you about how Meg and I met. It was back at Wesleyan while Meg and I were sophomores, 1976. We were in the same ten-man dorm apartment, so I knew that a romantic involvement would be complicated. Still, I couldn’t get her out of my mind-- her face, her long legs and womanly hips, her small but well shaped breasts, the smell of her cleanly shampooed blond hair. When she came back from a weekend visiting her boyfriend, I could smell sex. I was trying hard to be an A physics student but still make the scene. I was selling Thai sticks in the cafeteria and had a some hits of Owsley. So when she came into my room on Christmas eve and bought a hit which she immediately put on her pink tongue, what else could I do? One for her, two for me. We tripped together. As we felt the acid coming on we went for a walk. Wesleyan has seemingly endless underground tunnels connecting the entire campus. The halls were festooned with graffiti. The graffiti included many elaborate ...

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never never forget!” “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.” -- Lewis Carroll Remember back in high school when everyone had their favorite rock band that they marketed to their friends? Meg, like you, favored the Dead. I was a fan of Pink Floyd. Go back and listen to “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” with this episode in mind. Back in Montclair, old friends of my father who had been a doctor (he had died only a few years before) could not believe, despite my presenting with all the symptoms of acute liver failure, that my liver was so badly damaged. There was no reason they could find to explain my liver failure . (Turned out to be Wilson’s disease, a hard to diagnose genetic disorder where the liver is unable to kelate copper and the excess accumulates in the liver and leads to cirrhosis.) They could not find a reason for my liver to fail. They foolishly decided to do a liver biopsy. (I...

Spelunking The Collective Unconscious By Patient Number 70   Dear Dan: I  am the Hunter Thompson of illness, continuing to function under all sorts of adverse mental conditions, a skill learned the Hunter way in my youth that has served me well through the years.  I kept teaching to the bitter end of kidney failure.  I taught my class this morning before my dialysis.   If you haven’t seen the movie  Rum Diaries , you are missing out. -Michael Dear Dan: i am about to start the topic of variational calculus in classical mechanics.   The idea is that you describe motion as a trajectory (path) in time, and you imagine other paths than the one actually followed.   we call this imagined path the varied path “del-x”.   A key idea is the difference between this type of variation and the derivative from ordinary calculus,  usually called dx:   The derivative compares position at different times, where-as the del-x compares positions at the same time.  What is he difference between dreamin...